A blog for the Devon Wargames Group, which meets on the second Saturday of each month at the Whipton Institute, 20 Village Road, Whipton, Exeter, EX4 8AW. Doors open at 10.30am.

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Tuesday, 18 August 2015

Battle of Paraitakene 317BC refight. Part One: Planning

I was asked to organize one of
the games to be played at the August club meeting and the request was for it to
be an Ancients game using Hail Caesar and if possible for it to be between two Seleucid
type armies. Fortunately I have a couple of suitable armies that could go some
way towards this and with the addition of Steve Huntsman’s collection as well
then I reckoned that between us it was doable.

I thought that rather than just
doing the usual equal point’s battle which would look very "samey" with two identical forces, I would try instead to find an actual battle which we could refight.
So the first thing I did when I got back home was to call up Wikipedia and go
though all the Successor battles and try and find something suitable. I decided
on the Battle of Paraitakene between Eumenes and Antigonos in 317BC because it
was one I hadn't previously played, also the two sides were relatively even and
there was a reasonable amount of information regarding the forces involved.

Obviously the next step was to then
search the web for someone else’s re-fight of this battle, rip off their work
and then organize my figures accordingly for our particular game and rule set.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a re-fight that showed me anything useful on how
to convert this battle onto the tabletop and instead of doing the normal thing
of giving up immediately and trying to find another battle that did have the forces
broken down for wargaming , I thought that I would actually try and work it out
for myself.

First step then was to tie down a
source for the numbers involved, fortunately I have a reasonable library built
up over the years of suitable books for this period and combined with another
trawl through the Net I ended up with two sources that had good enough details to
allow me to have the confidence that I had the forces involved reasonably right
rather than just copy off whatever was on the Wiki page.

I used the excellent book by
Richard A. Billows “ Antigonus the One-Eyed”

These then had to be split down
into their relevant troop types which using the above sources came out as:

Eumenes

Antigonos

Silver
Shields 6000

Macedonians
8000

Mercenaries
6000

Mercenaries
9000

Levy
Asiatic Pikes 5000

Lycians/Pamphilians
3000

Levy
Asiatic Pikes 8000

Companions
900

Light
Horse 1500

Companions
1000

Agema
900

Agema
600

Other
Cavalry 2700

Light
Horse 4500

Other
Cavalry 4400

Persian
archers 10000

Assorted
other types 8000

Bowmen,
Slingers ,Javelins 10000

Next was to convert everything
into wargame figures and into
also HC units. After several beers I decided that the best way to do this was to
work with ratios/percentages and as long as I kept them as close to the actual battle
then I could work around units straight away rather than the normal one man = 500
etc. method . This would then allow me to draw up two armies out of the units.

It’s probably easier if I show
you.

The result of that calculating made real

In the actual battle the
percentage ratio in heavy infantry was 38:62 in Antigonus favour so for the
game I had 15 units of HI, 6 v 9 which
works out as 40:60 , close enough.

The rest worked out as:

Eumenes

Antigonos

game

actual

actual

game

40%

38%

Infantry ratio

62%

60%

36.4

36.4

Cavalry ratio

63.6

63.6

66.7

65.8

Elephants

34.2

33.3

64

64.3

Light Infantry

35.7

36

At the same time I did still have
to come up with some rough split of troops–to-units ratio and rather than
impress you with my genius I have to admit I just guessed on what looked about right
and fitted them into the game and rules.

HI were therefore 3000 men per
unit

Cavalry were 1000 per unit

Light Infantry were 2000 per unit.

Skirmishers as small units 500
per

Don’t go looking for any
rationality behind these figures as there isn't one.

I still had additional unused
information from the above mentioned two sources on the actual make up of both
armies so I allocated them all as best I could into the various sub groups and
then with a bit of subtle rounding up/down to the nearest figure plus combining
a few similar units together, it all worked out very nicely in the end.

The one thing I didn't do was
work out the ratio between all the various types to each other but that’s frankly
taking thinks too far plus my curry was getting cold.

After that it was a matter of
getting out the HC Army lists and making up two armies from the Alexander’s
Successors List to match my deductions . I don’t plan at the moment to include
the HC armies but they are available if requested however as there isn't going
to be much I can write for the re-fight that puts me in a good light then I
might find myself with a bit of unexpected space in part two that needs filling .

Terrain was easy in that it was
fought on a plain and had some hills on two sides that didn't come into play.

Next up: part two, which will cover
the re-fight, how I lost and the creation of a new club phrase.